CHAOS: THE BROADSHEETS OF ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM was first
published in 1985 by Grim Reaper Press of Weehawken, New
Jersey; a later re-issue was published in Providence, Rhode
Island, and this edition was pirated in Boulder, Colorado.
Another edition was released by Verlag Golem of Providence
in 1990, and pirated in Santa Cruz, California, by We Press.
"The Temporary Autonomous Zone" was performed at the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, and on
WBAI-FM in New York City, in 1990.

Chaos

CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful
monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any
mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original
undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as
the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually
intoxicated.

Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's
neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass &
define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers
& phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own
facelessness, like clouds.

Everything in nature is perfectly real including
consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about.
Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never
existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never
got started, Eros never grew a beard.

No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold
you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body &
shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of
disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with
inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious
emotions.

There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path;
already you're the monarch of your own skin--your inviolable
freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other
monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of
sky.

To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history
demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age--shamans not
priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of
paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a
sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit
presence, the clockless nowever.

Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone
capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever
of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love &
desire to the point of terror--everything else is just
shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains,
sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal
censorship & useless pain.

Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church
state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off
from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost
words, imaginary bombs.

The last possible deed is that which defines perception
itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal
dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you
here they'd call it an act of terrorism--so let's take our
pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken
bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the
taste of chaos.

WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies.
Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as
bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize
houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist
objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy.
Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to
an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square
miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an
orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss.
Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they
believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be
driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of
existence.

Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or
private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a
particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.

Go naked for a sign.

Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds
that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual
beauty.

Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid
public momuments--PT-art can also be created for public
places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small
fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under
windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans
pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to
random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio
transmissions, wet cement...

The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT
ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror--
powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden
intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether
the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it
is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's
life (aside from the artist) it fails.

PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no
rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at
all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional
structures for art consumption (galleries, publications,
media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street
theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.

An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of
mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a
deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The
PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is
not money but CHANGE.

Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not
realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done
is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics,
don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be
ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced,
do something children will remember all their lives--but
don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.

Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is
against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime
as art.

AMOUR FOU IS NOT a Social Democracy, it is not a Parliament
of Two. The minutes of its secret meetings deal with
meanings too enormous but too precise for prose. Not this,
not that--its Book of Emblems trembles in your hand.

Naturally it shits on schoolmasters & police, but it sneers
at liberationists & ideologues as well--it is not a clean
well-lit room. A topological charlatan laid out its
corridors & abandoned parks, its ambush-decor of luminous
black & membranous maniacal red.

Each of us owns half the map--like two renaissance
potentates we define a new culture with our anathematized
mingling of bodies, merging of liquids--the Imaginal seams
of our City-state blur in our sweat.

Ontological anarchism never came back from its last fishing
trip. So long as no one squeals to the FBI, CHAOS cares
nothing for the future of civilization. Amour fou breeds
only by accident--its primary goal is ingestion of the
Galaxy. A conspiracy of transmutation.

Its only concern for the Family lies in the possibility of
incest ("Grow your own!" "Every human a Pharoah!")--O most
sincere of readers, my semblance, my brother/sister!--& in
the masturbation of a child it finds concealed (like a
japanese-paper-flower-pill) the image of the crumbling of
the State.

Words belong to those who use them only till someone else
steals them back. The Surrealists disgraced themselves by
selling amour fou to the ghost-machine of Abstraction--they
sought in their unconsciousness only power over others, & in
this they followed de Sade (who wanted "freedom" only for
grown-up whitemen to eviscerate women & children).

Amour fou is saturated with its own aesthetic, it fills
itself to the borders of itself with the trajectories of its
own gestures, it runs on angels' clocks, it is not a fit
fate for commissars & shopkeepers. Its ego evaporates in the
mutability of desire, its communal spirit withers in the
selfishness of obsession.

Amour fou involves non-ordinary sexuality the way sorcery
demands non-ordinary consciousness. The anglo-saxon post-
Protestant world channels all its suppressed sensuality into
advertising & splits itself into clashing mobs: hysterical
prudes vs promiscuous clones & former-ex-singles. AF doesn't
want to join anyone's army, it takes no part in the Gender
Wars, it is bored by equal opportunity employment (in fact
it refuses to work for a living), it doesn't complain,
doesn't explain, never votes & never pays taxes.

AF would like to see every bastard ("lovechild") come to
term & birthed--AF thrives on anti-entropic devices--AF
loves to be molested by children--AF is better than prayer,
better than sinsemilla--AF takes its own palmtrees & moon
wherever it goes. AF admires tropicalismo, sabotage, break-
dancing, Layla & Majnun, the smells of gunpowder & sperm.

AF is always illegal, whether it's disguised as a marriage
or a boyscout troop--always drunk, whether on the wine of
its own secretions or the smoke of its own polymorphous
virtues. It is not the derangement of the senses but rather
their apotheosis--not the result of freedom but rather its
precondition. Lux et voluptas.

THE FULL MOON'S UNFATHOMABLE light-path--mid-May midnight in
some State that starts with "I," so two-dimensional it can
scarcely be said to possess any geography at all--the beams
so urgent & tangible you must draw the shades in order to
think in words.

No question of writing to Wild Children. They think in
images--prose is for them a code not yet fully digested &
ossified, just as for us never fully trusted.

You may write about them, so that others who have lost the
silver chain may follow. Or write for them, making of
STORY & EMBLEM a process of seduction into your own
paleolithic memories, a barbaric enticement to liberty
(chaos as CHAOS understands it).

For this otherworld species or "third sex,"
les enfants sauvages, fancy & Imagination are still
undifferentiated. Unbridled PLAY: at one & the same time the
source of our Art & of all the race's rarest eros.

To embrace disorder both as wellspring of style & voluptuous
storehouse, a fundamental of our alien & occult
civilization, our conspiratorial esthetic, our lunatic
espionage--this is the action (let's face it) either of an
artist of some sort, or of a ten- or thirteen-year-old.

Children whose clarified senses betray them into a brilliant
sorcery of beautiful pleasure reflect something feral &
smutty in the nature of reality itself: natural ontological
anarchists, angels of chaos--their gestures & body odors
broadcast around them a jungle of presence, a forest of
prescience complete with snakes, ninja weapons, turtles,
futuristic shamanism, incredible mess, piss, ghosts,
sunlight, jerking off, birds' nests & eggs--gleeful
aggression against the groan-ups of those Lower Planes so
powerless to englobe either destructive epiphanies or
creation in the form of antics fragile but sharp enough to
slice moonlight.

And yet the denizens of these inferior jerkwater dimensions
truly believe they control the destinies of Wild Children--&
down here, such vicious beliefs actually sculpt most of
the substance of happenstance.

The only ones who actually wish to share the mischievous
destiny of those savage runaways or minor guerillas rather
than dictate it, the only ones who can understand that
cherishing & unleashing are the same act--these are mostly
artists, anarchists, perverts, heretics, a band apart (as
much from each other as from the world) or able to meet only
as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinnertable
while adults gibber from behind their masks.

Too young for Harley choppers--flunk-outs, break-dancers,
scarcely pubescent poets of flat lost railroad towns--a
million sparks falling from the skyrockets of Rimbaud &
Mowgli--slender terrorists whose gaudy bombs are compacted
of polymorphous love & the precious shards of popular
culture--punk gunslingers dreaming of piercing their ears,
animist bicyclists gliding in the pewter dusk through
Welfare streets of accidental flowers--out-of-season gypsy
skinny-dippers, smiling sideways-glancing thieves of power-
totems, small change & panther-bladed knives--we sense them
everywhere--we publish this offer to trade the corruption of
our own lux et gaudium for their perfect gentle filth.

So get this: our realization, our liberation depends on
theirs--not because we ape the Family, those "misers of
love" who hold hostages for a banal future, nor the State
which schools us all to sink beneath the event-horizon of a
tedious "usefulness"--no--but because we & they, the wild
ones, are images of each other, linked & bordered by that
silver chain which defines the pale of sensuality,
transgression & vision.

We share the same enemies & our means of triumphant escape
are also the same: a delirious & obsessive play, powered
by the spectral brilliance of the wolves & their children.

CONSTELLATIONS BY WHICH TO steer the barque of the soul.
"If the moslem understood Islam he would become an idol-
worshipper."--Mahmud Shabestari
Eleggua, ugly opener of doors with a hook in his head &
cowrie shells for eyes, black santeria cigar & glass of rum-
-same as Ganesh, elephant-head fat boy of Beginnings who
rides a mouse.
The organ which senses the numinous atrophies with the
senses. Those who cannot feel baraka cannot know the caress
of the world.

Hermes Poimandres taught the animation of eidolons, the
magic in-dwelling of icons by spirits--but those who cannot
perform this rite on themselves & on the whole palpable
fabric of material being will inherit only blues, rubbish,
decay.

The pagan body becomes a Court of Angels who all perceive
this place--this very grove--as paradise ("If there is a
paradise, surely it is here!"--inscription on a Mughal
garden gate)..

But ontological anarchism is too paleolithic for eschatology-
-things are real, sorcery works, bush-spirits one with the
Imagination, death an unpleasant vagueness--the plot of
Ovid's Metamorphoses--an epic of mutability. The personal
mythscape.

Paganism has not yet invented laws--only virtues. No
priestcraft, no theology or metaphysics or morality--but a
universal shamanism in which no one attains real humanity
without a vision.

Food money sex sleep sun sand & sinsemilla--love truth peace
freedom & justice. Beauty. Dionysus the drunk boy on a
panther--rank adolescent sweat--Pan goatman slogs through
the solid earth up to his waist as if it were the sea, his
skin crusted with moss & lichen--Eros multiplies himself
into a dozen pastoral naked Iowa farm boys with muddy feet &
pond-scum on their thighs.

Raven, the potlatch trickster, sometimes a boy, old woman,
bird who stole the Moon, pine needles floating on a pond,
Heckle/Jeckle totempole-head, chorus-line of crows with
silver eyes dancing on the woodpile--same as Semar the
hunchback albino hermaphrodite shadow-puppet patron of the
Javanese revolution.

Yemaya, bluestar sea-goddess & patroness of queers--same as
Tara, bluegrey aspect of Kali, necklace of skulls, dancing
on Shiva's stiff lingam, licking monsoon clouds with her
yard-long tongue--same as Loro Kidul, jasper-green Javanese
sea-goddess who bestows the power of invulnerability on
sultans by tantrik intercourse in magic towers & caves.

>From one point of view ontological anarchism is extremely
bare, stripped of all qualities & possessions, poor as CHAOS
itself--but from another point of view it pullulates with
baroqueness like the Fucking-Temples of Kathmandu or an
alchemical emblem book--it sprawls on its divan eating
loukoum & entertaining heretical notions, one hand inside
its baggy trousers.

The hulls of its pirate ships are lacquered black, the
lateen sails are red, black banners with the device of a
winged hourglass.

A South China Sea of the mind, off a jungle-flat coast of
palms, rotten gold temples to unknown bestiary gods, island
after island, the breeze like wet yellow silk on naked skin,
navigating by pantheistic stars, hierophany on hierophany,
light upon light against the luminous & chaotic dark.

ART SABOTAGE STRIVES TO be perfectly exemplary but at the
same time retain an element of opacity--not propaganda but
aesthetic shock--apallingly direct yet also subtly angled--
action-as-metaphor.

Art Sabotage is the dark side of Poetic Terrorism--creation-
through-destruction--but it cannot serve any Party, nor any
nihilism, nor even art itself. Just as the banishment of
illusion enhances awareness, so the demolition of aesthetic
blight sweetens the air of the world of discourse, of the
Other. Art Sabotage serves only consciousness,
attentiveness, awakeness.

Individual artworks (even the worst) are largely irrelevant-
-A-S seeks to damage institutions which use art to diminish
consciousness & profit by delusion. This or that poet or
painter cannot be condemned for lack of vision--but malign
Ideas can be assaulted through the artifacts they generate.
MUZAK is designed to hypnotize & control--its machinery can
be smashed.

Public book burnings--why should rednecks & Customs
officials monopolize this weapon? Novels about children
possessed by demons; the New York Times bestseller list;
feminist tracts against pornography; schoolbooks (especially
Social Studies, Civics, Health); piles of New York Post ,
Village Voice & other supermarket papers; choice gleanings
of Xtian publishers; a few Harlequin Romances--a festive
atmosphere, wine-bottles & joints passed around on a clear
autumn afternoon.

To throw money away at the Stock Exchange was pretty decent
Poetic Terrorism--but to destroy the money would have been
good Art Sabotage. To seize TV transmission & broadcast a
few pirated minutes of incendiary Chaote art would
constitute a feat of PT--but simply to blow up the
transmission tower would be perfectly adequate Art Sabotage.
If certain galleries & museums deserve an occasional brick
through their windows--not destruction, but a jolt to
complacency--then what about BANKS? Galleries turn beauty
into a commodity but banks transmute Imagination into feces
and debt. Wouldn't the world gain a degree of beauty with
each bank that could be made to tremble...or fall? But how?
Art Sabotage should probably stay away from politics (it's
so boring)--but not from banks.

Don't picket--vandalize. Don't protest--deface. When
ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you,
turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate. Smash
the symbols of the Empire in the name of nothing but the
heart's longing for grace.

ACROSS THE LUSTER OF the desert & into the polychrome hills,
hairless & ochre violet dun & umber, at the top of a
dessicate blue valley travelers find an artificial oasis, a
fortified castle in saracenic style enclosing a hidden
garden.

As guests of the Old Man of the Mountain Hassan-i Sabbah
they climb rock-cut steps to the castle. Here the Day of
Resurrection has already come & gone--those within live
outside profane Time, which they hold at bay with daggers &
poisons.

Each of those who enter the realm of the Imam-of-one's-own-
being becomes a sultan of inverted revelation, a monarch of
abrogation & apostasy. In a central chamber scalloped with
light and hung with tapestried arabesques they lean on
bolsters & smoke long chibouks of haschisch scented with
opium & amber.

For them the hierarchy of being has compacted to a
dimensionless punctum of the real--for them the chains of
Law have been broken--they end their fasting with wine. For
them the outside of everything is its inside, its true face
shines through direct. But the garden gates are camouflaged
with terrorism, mirrors, rumors of assassination, trompe
l'oeil, legends.

By night Hassan-i Sabbah like a civilized wolf in a turban
stretches out on a parapet above the garden & glares at the
sky, conning the asterisms of heresy in the mindless cool
desert air. True, in this myth some aspirant disciples may
be ordered to fling themselves off the ramparts into the
black--but also true that some of them will learn to fly
like sorcerers.

The emblem of Alamut holds in the mind, a mandals or magic
circle lost to history but embedded or imprinted in
consciousness. The Old Man flits like a ghost into tents of
kings & bedrooms of theologians, past all locks & guards
with forgotten moslem/ninja techniques, leaves behind bad
dreams, stilettos on pillows, puissant bribes.

The attar of his propaganda seeps into the criminal dreams
of ontological anarchism, the heraldry of our obsessions
displays the luminous black outlaw banners of the
Assassins...all of them pretenders to the throne of an
Imaginal Egypt, an occult space/light continuum consumed by
still-unimagined liberties.

INVENTED BY THE CHINESE but never developed for war--a fine
example of Poetic Terrorism--a weapon used to trigger
aesthetic shock rather than kill--the Chinese hated war &
used to go into mourning when armies were raised--gunpowder
more useful to frighten malign demons, delight children,
fill the air with brave & risky-smelling haze.

Build frame-lattice lancework set-pieces on the roofs of
insurance buildings or schools--a kundalini-snake or Chaos-
dragon coiled barium-green against a background of sodium-
oxalate yellow--Don't Tread On Me--or copulating monsters
shooting wads of jizm-fire at a Baptists old folks home.

Comets that explode with the odor of hashish & radioactive
charcoal--swampghouls & will-o'-the-wisps haunting public
parks--fake St. Elmo's fire flickering over the architecture
of the bourgeoisie--strings of lady-fingers falling on the
Legislature floor--salamander-elementals attack well-known
moral reformers.

Blazing shellac, sugar of milk, strontium, pitch, gum water,
gerbs of chinese fire--for a few moments the air is ozone-
sharp--drifting opal cloud of pungent dragon/phoenix smoke.
For an instant the Empire falls, its princes & governors
flee to their stygian muck, plumes of sulphur from elf-
flamethrowers burning their pinched asses as they retreat.
The Assassin-child, psyche of fire, holds sway for one brief
dogstar-hot night.